I found a curious little bug and I'm interested in who you think should take responsibility for it. My mobile network provider sent me this message: I clicked on the link, and got this error message from their website: The error is caused by the trailing full-stop. Remove the full-stop and the page loads. There are four potential culprits here... Virgin Media's Web Team Should their website handle stray punctuation at the end of a URl? Most webservers can be configured to take users…
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Long time readers will know I used to work in the mobile industry. I used to blog about all the crappy things that customers experienced. Well, I'm back, with a doozey! I decided to sign a new contract with Virgin Mobile. After a brief chat with customer services, I agreed a contract for two new pay monthly SIMs and negotiated a handy discount. I was told the SIMs would be sent out, and I could expect them in 3-5 days! That's the first mistake. We live in a world where people can buy the…
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SIP is a stupid acronym. It's basically a standard way of making phone calls over the Internet. This means you can make and receive phone calls over WiFi. Here's how I got it working - for free - on Android. By the end of this tutorial you will be able to: Receive calls to a new phone number, sent via WiFi to your Android handset. Receive calls to your existing phone number, redirected to arrive over WiFi. Get a SIP account Sign up for a free SIPGate Basic account. Doesn't cost you…
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I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System. (Actually, Symbian's ownership and relationship with Nokia is complex. But let's gloss over that for now.) Symbian was, for its time, a brilliant OS. It ran 3D games smoothly, had terrific hardware support, a…
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One of the (many many many) things our team worked on this week finally went live: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentYou can now access most NHS services from your mobile, with no data charges.In awe of the team who pulled this together very quickly. gov.uk/government/new…gov.ukMobile networks remove data charges for online NHS coronavirus adviceFree access to online NHS services will be available for as long as coronavirus (COVID-19) remains widespread in the UK.❤️ 507💬 17♻️ 019:30 - Wed 18 Mar…
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I have a lot of smarthome gadgets - but my favourite is the Tado° Thermostat. I think it might be the most boring gadget I've ever used - and that's why I love it! We spend far too much time staring at our screens. We obsessively tend to our digital gardens and rarely spend the time to enjoy them. Our smart watches constantly buzz with news from the social media service du jour. Where are the apps that respect our time? Tado° is the most boring app on the planet. I used it once to set up …
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Here's a quick write-up of a minor XSS (Cross Site Scripting) vulnerability on the website of Three.co.uk - one of the UK's mobile providers. A brief recap... Most websites have a search function. If you search for something which cannot be found, the site will often say "No results found for XYZ." If we can convince the search engine to spit out HTML, we can inject malicious content into the page. This is usually done by searching for something like <script>alert("h4X0r");</script>…
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I review a lot of tech kit. It is amazing just how bad the consumer experience is when you have a brand-new box in your hands. It can be as simple as difficult to open packaging, to the existential horror of a poorly translated manual. The first time a customer holds your product in their hands should be a moment of joy. Something to reinforce the notion that they have been wise with their investment. I'm going to walk through an example of a poor unboxing usability, in the hope that it will…
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I found a bunch of my old school-books that I wanted to digitally capture. I do have a flatbed scanner, but most of my 1980s workbooks were far too large for it. So I decided to build a cheap scanning table. Ingredients Old Phone Tripod - £8. White table Selfie-stick button! - £2 The Bluetooth selfie-stick button was necessary because tapping the screen on the phone made the somewhat-unstable tripod bounce around a bit. Not great for in-focus shots. It took a few attempts to find a s…
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To celebrate the upcoming series Doctor Who staring Jodie Whittaker, I'm attempting to chronicle all the mobile phones used in previous shows. If you think you've spotted something that's not listed here, or think I've made a mistake, drop it in the comments. You can follow along with all 10 series. Rose From the start of "New Who" mobile phones are integral to the plot. Rose Tyler has the ultra zeitgeisty Nokia 3200. With its distinctive double-button design and gorgeous holographic…
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My mobile provider - Three UK - offers WiFi calling, but only if you have a phone purchased directly from them. For everyone else, they have a crappy app which hasn't been updated in two years. So, let's break out of their artificial restrictions and get some WiFi calling on the OnePlus 5T! Step-by-step Open your phone dialler app. Dial *#800# You don't need to press send, you should automatically be taken to this engineering menu Touch the top menu item "oneplus Logkit" Scroll to the…
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Another in an occasional series of blog posts where I discuss products I've worked on which failed. It boiled down to this. Was there a way we could make normal people want to be on a conference call with their family and friends? Let me explain. ARPU - Average Revenue Per User - that's all mobile network operators care about. When it's up, the money flows like wine. When it's down... the drought makes people do crazy things. Voice revenue had been falling for years. Skype and WhatsApp…
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